A checking tool for references already present in a medical manuscript or bibliography. It compares citations with PubMed, a medical research database, and CrossRef, a scholarly publication registry.

Use it to audit references in Markdown, Word documents, BibTeX files, text files, or TSV files. It records its findings in qc/referenceaudit.json without changing your reference files.

It helps catch made-up citations, incorrect publication details, and references that do not match the cited work before submission.

verify-refs — Skill for Claude Code by Aperivue

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add Aperivue/medsci-skills --skill verify-refs

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Aperivue/medsci-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install medsci-literature, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/verify-refs/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/verify-refs)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/verify-refs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/verify-refs/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/verify-refs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/verify-refs.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,670 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00042	$0.03670
Opus 5	$0.00021	$0.01835
Sonnet 5	$0.00008	$0.00734
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00367

Measured 3d ago against content hash 09d8f8899feb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

verify-refs scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 15 executable files (scripts/_claim_evidence.py, scripts/_quote_match.py, scripts/check_claim_fidelity.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/verify-refs/SKILL.md · 256 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 256 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Verify References (Audit-Only)

You help a medical researcher prevent reference hallucinations before submission. This skill audits an existing manuscript or bibliography. It does not write to references/ or manuscript/_src/refs.bib. It does not discover new literature; use /search-lit for discovery and /lit-sync for bib management.

When to Use

Before journal submission, especially for .docx manuscripts inherited from coauthors or external editors.
After AI-assisted drafting or revision introduced or modified references.
When a reviewer or collaborator flags a possibly fabricated citation.
Before /sync-submission freezes a journal package.

Inputs

Manuscript or bibliography path: .md, .docx, .bib, .txt, or .tsv.
Optional project root. Default: current working directory.
Optional flags passed to the script:
- --offline: extract and classify references without API verification.
- --timeout N: HTTP timeout seconds.

Companion: pandoc citation key check

For markdown manuscripts using pandoc [@bibkey] citations, validate citation keys first to catch undefined/unused keys before this audit. If you also use the companion manage-refs skill, run its check_citation_keys.py for this; otherwise use your reference manager's citation-key check.

Then run verify_refs.py against the .bib to validate each entry against PubMed/CrossRef. The two checks are complementary: a citation-key check catches mis-keyed cites; verify_refs.py catches fabricated metadata.

Deterministic Script

Run the bundled script rather than verifying citations by memory:

python "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/verify_refs.py" manuscript/manuscript.md --project-root .

For hooks or quick manual runs, use the wrapper:

"${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/verify_cli.sh" manuscript/manuscript.md --offline

Manual pre-submission strict run (Phase 1A.5):

"${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/verify_cli.sh" manuscript/index.qmd --strict

Read the full file on GitHub · 256 lines

Files

What ships with it

27 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

3d ago Changed · +23 lines 09d8f8899feb
10d ago First seen · 233 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 95d6608cf159

Subscribe to this mod's changes

verify-refs is a skill published in the GitHub repository Aperivue/medsci-skills (291 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 3,670 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Claude Code Research Scientific biostatistics claude-skills clinical-research diagnostic-accuracy literature-review

clinical-trials-search

Search ClinicalTrials.gov with natural language queries. Find clinical trials, enrollment, and outcomes using Valyu semantic search.

beita6969/ScienceClaw · 28 tokens

shidi

A Chinese-language research assistant role that turns a user’s ideas into literature reviews, experiment plans, figures and organised data.

IcyCreamDAS/shidi-skill · 126 tokens

clinical-research

Use when designing a prospective clinical study before submission — selecting and classifying endpoints (primary / key-secondary / exploratory, with surrogate-endpoint flagging), estimating sample size and power for two-arm designs (means / proportions / survival), or scoring a study plan for feasibility and a GO /…

bestagentkits/agency-skills · 152 tokens

verify-refs